Press Releases

People.ai Acquires Salesforce Productivity Company Hero Research and Launches New Embedded Salesforce Experience

May 11, 2021

Today, we are excited to announce two big milestones that represent a major step toward achieving our vision to unlock growth for B2B sales teams using the combination of AI and business activity data. Now, more so than ever, People.ai is poised to unlock new levels of productivity for the revenue team across sales, marketing and customer success.

First, we’ve acquired Hero Research, a state-of-the-art Salesforce productivity app that allows sales reps to effortlessly access and update go-to-market systems such as Salesforce within Chrome using a simple and lightning fast GoogleSheets-like interface. Second, we’ve launched a new embedded Salesforce experience, allowing every member of the sales organization to access the power of People.ai natively from within Salesforce and without opening a single additional browser tab.

Both announcements are really personal for me.

I started my career in sales, and every day I was frustrated by our tools of the trade. I spent way too much time updating my pipeline, accounts, and field activity in Salesforce and I felt constrained to force fit my approach to selling into a clunky set of prescribed processes and rules. In the end, I kept my own spreadsheet to track what was happening across my accounts and opportunities. This allowed me to plug gaps in standard issue sales tools, but it also required me to spend even more of my time on admin since I had to duplicate data in two places. What frustrated me most was knowing that every hour I spent with these tools was an hour less spent selling.  

Once I became CEO, my point of view evolved. In order to run a thriving business, I needed scalable, repeatable processes that delivered consistent and predictable results. I also relied on accurate and complete data to optimize and improve sales conversion rates from the top to the bottom of the funnel. While I empathized with reps who wanted the autonomy to manage their pipeline their way, I saw how affording the field too much latitude broke the systems we relied on to understand, measure and run our business. I also recognized that as the quality of our data deteriorated, we lost our ability to inspect, benchmark and coach our field teams to success.

And that’s when the lightbulb went on. Using the power of AI, we could develop a solution that delivered the best of both worlds—increased productivity and reliable data.  With today’s announcement, we’re bringing this vision to life.  

Here’s what I’m most excited about in our new Hero Research capabilities and embedded Salesforce experience.

I love Hero Research because it delivers the thing every rep has been screaming for—a single pane of glass to do their job better than ever. No more tab sprawl, no more cutting and pasting, no more shadow spreadsheets. Now, with a Chrome browser and a few clicks, reps can create their own personalized window into Salesforce and other go-to-market systems like Gainsight and 6Sense. They’ll get access to critical sales data served up the way they want it and enhanced by People.ai AI-driven insights. And here’s the best part—it’s free for reps who can get up and running with one click and zero admin or IT support. It’s the easiest, most powerful tool reps will have in their quiver.    

As excited as I am about what we’re delivering with Hero Research, I recognize that reps and managers will still need to spend time inside of Salesforce. Sales Operations teams have invested heavily in mission critical workflows that can only be accessed within the solution and for decades they’ve been looking for a silver bullet that will maximize usage. That’s why we built an embedded Salesforce experience. We’ve seamlessly integrated the power of People.ai’s benchmarks, leading indicators and sales insights with Salesforce’s native pipeline, account and opportunity views. On top of that, we fill critical gaps in Salesforce with functionality reps love such as auto-populated relationship maps, deal scorecards and digital playbooks. People.ai does the heavy lifting by bringing the tools and the data into Salesforce, allowing sales ops to deliver a better end-user experience to their teams and giving reps new tools to accelerate bookings. Customers who have deployed the product tell me that in a few weeks, this solution has had a bigger impact on Salesforce adoption than years of serving up other carrots and sticks.

Since the inception of People.ai, we’ve been committed to helping B2B enterprises take their average revenue per sales rep to new heights. Zoom is one of many examples. Prior to the pandemic, they realized a staggering 42% increase in pipeline and they continue to rely on us to keep pace with unprecedented demand for their solution.  With today’s announcements, we continue to advance our mission. Our new capabilities are going to blow you away. But don’t take my word for it. Try them out for yourself and let us know what you think.

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